10 Crucial Prepper Pantry Items You Need to Stock Now!

10 Crucial Prepper Pantry Items You Need to Stock Now!

Homemakers need to ensure they have more than just food in their Prepper Pantry. Are you in charge of your family’s Prepper Pantry? You may be well stocked with food, but do you also have these 10 crucial Prepper Pantry items no one wants to be caught without during an emergency?

In my latest video, I’ll show you the critical items you need so you’ll be well prepared in case disaster strikes, and you need to rely on the food and non-food items you stored in advance. (Note: This is note a sponsored video or post. I bought and use all the items that I show you.)

Crucial Prepper Pantry Items Are More Than Just Food

You’ll need food as part of your Prepper Pantry, of course. (And if you haven’t started on your Prepper Pantry yet, I’ll show you how.) But you need more than just food.

If a calamity strikes, such as a natural disaster, you may be stuck in your home and be unable to leave. (Or, you may not want to leave!) You’ll want to draw on your two-week emergency food supply that you’ve stored in your Prepper Pantry. (I also show you how to easily create a two-week emergency food supply with a printable meal plan.) This emergency supply of food will help you and your family get through a temporary crisis.

As I describe in my latest Prepper Pantry video, you’ll also want to ensure you have these 10 crucial non-food items on hand. I preview a few of them in this blog post but be sure to watch my crucial Prepper Pantry items video for more in-depth information and the complete list.

Crucial Water Items

Think about the supply of water in your Prepper Pantry. (Maybe check on your water supply too while it’s on your mind.) Do you have enough for your family, including your pets? Are you focused on only drinking water, or do you have extra for hygiene?

How much more water do you have in case you have additional family members that need to stay with you during this time? Do you have auxiliary potable water supplies to share with your friends and neighbors who may be in need?

During the week-long Texas ice storm in 2021, we were able to share our stored water jugs with our friends who were without water during this time. They had electricity but no water because the pumping station serving their community was without power. (Alas. We were out of electricity for much of the time as the grid operators had to rotate brownouts to preserve the power that was available and ensure that hospitals and other essential services received an uninterrupted supply.)

You may be able to store water for emergencies, but how much can you actually stock up and also keep fresh and potable? It might not be enough and you might run out of water during emergency situations. That’s why you need these crucial water items to help expand your capacity to get and store water right before a storm hits and use the water while you’re still under the stresses and outages that a disaster brings.

Water Bob

Right before the worst of the Texas ice storm, I filled up a Water Bob, which is a large, expandable, and durable plastic bag you can put water in and store in your bathtub.

Whether you’re preparing for a summer or winter calamity, you’ll want to fill your Water Bob before a bad storm when there’s a chance your water supply might be cut off.

You can think of this water as the extra available to you in case your stored water runs out. After you fill it from your bathtub faucet, a Water Bob gives you up to 100 gallons of drinkable water. However, if you’re not comfortable drinking from a plastic bag (and you have other water sources available), you can use the Water Bob to provide you with water for hygiene.

If you have more than one bathtub, you’ll want to get a Water Bob for each bathtub to maximize your water storage ability. Then, after the storm and its aftermath pass and you know your water supply is reliable, you can empty your Water Bob of its contents as your get your life and home back to normal.

Note that for sanitary purposes, you can’t reuse Water Bobs. But having them already as part of your Prepper Pantry is crucial to making sure you have enough water during an emergency.

Life Straws

What happens if you run out of your:

• Stored water – Such as the bottled or home canned water that you stowed in advance in your Prepper Pantry
• Extra water – Such as the additional water you stored in your Water Bob or extra containers in advance of an impending storm

If you deplete your stored and extra water, you’ll need to consider water from sources that may not be clean of contaminants, bacteria, or other items that may make you ill. These water sources may be stagnant ponds, swimming pools, or partially frozen streams.

For those suspect water sources, be sure to have Life Straws for each family member. This critical product will help you decontaminate the water you may be forced to drink from when you run out of your potable water supplies.

Trivet with Tea Lights

If you’re famished or in a situation where you can’t access a heat source, you’ll grudgingly open up a can of food from your Prepper Pantry and eat it cold. You may be thinking about such a gloomy scenario right now, and it is as depressing as you envision.

Light and the warmth of a flame or fire are such a morale boost during times of stress. Not only does its illumination push back the physical and mental darkness, but the heat from a fire also provides physical comfort during frigid weather and warms food to make it taste better and further warm your body.

However, you may not be in surroundings where you can have a large fire because of space or ventilation concerns, and you may not want to try to cook things in your fireplace. That’s where the trivet with tea lights is the perfect solution.

After lighting the tea candles that nestle into the middle of the trivet, you can warm soup or other canned food in a small saucepan for a delicious meal that will boost your and your family’s morale.

Additionally, you can heat up water in a glass kettle for a refreshing cup of coffee or an aromatic tea. I remember savoring a warm cup of coffee, wrapped in a blanket when our house was without power, and the temperature outside was in the single digits.

The trivet with tea lights is another crucial item you’ll be glad to have on hand in case you need to prepare food or warm liquids when you’re without electricity.

Refrigerator Temperature Monitors

I have two refrigerators, and both have temperature refrigerator monitors to help me know the temperature of my refrigerator and freezer. The monitors I use come with a digital display and two temperature sensors. I placed one sensor in my refrigerator and the other in my freezer.

Using the magnets on the back of the digital display, you can stick the display to the front door of your refrigerator so you can see the temperatures inside your refrigerator and freezer. This device comes in handy throughout the year to make sure I have the temperature controls set correctly for my appliance.

During that terrible Texas ice storm, my temperature refrigerator monitors became crucial Prepper Pantry items. Just because it’s below freezing outside doesn’t mean that your inside refrigerators will stay cold without power. They’ll climb to room temperature, which is above freezing (hopefully!), but still not cold enough to prevent your refrigerator or freezer contents from defrosting and spoiling.

I used my devices to monitor the temperatures in my refrigerators and freezers. When they displayed temperatures I felt would bring ruin to the food, I moved my vital food into a cooler in the below 32°F temperatures outside. One of my temperature monitors went with the food outside so I could continue to make sure that my items stayed cold until the power reliably came back on and my refrigerator could go back to being a dependable member of my kitchen appliances.

Thus, my temperature refrigerator monitors serve me both in regular times and times of crisis. They are powered by batteries, and I always have extra batteries on hand for my monitors and other critical devices, including my emergency radio.

Emergency Radio

Connection to the outside world is vital for us to know what’s going on during an emergency. We can get information about storms or other looming crises from the Internet, TV, and radio, but what happens when the power is out and when ice or hurricane-force winds knock out the electricity and cell towers? Our mobile devices will get cut off from the outside world, and without power, our TVs will cease their usefulness to us.

However, we can usually get emergency information from our radios, and better yet, we can tune into news stations to get ongoing reports about storms and their impact on our towns and cities.

During the ice storm that paralyzed Texas, our emergency radio provided us with news about the outside world and how our fellow Texans were faring. The news reports also gave us comfort that we were not cut off from the world, there were others in the same situation as us, and government and industry were trying their best to get us through the worst of the storm’s effects.

The following pictures show you our new emergency radio. (We’ll talk about that old emergency radio in a moment.)

Unfortunately, our emergency radio was old and did not include a USB plug to enable us to charge our mobile devices. (Do you remember those old proprietary plugs that the different mobile phone manufacturers used to make? Well, to our amusement, our old emergency radio provided us with a variety of those useless connectors that wouldn’t connect to our modern-day electronic devices.

After the ice storm was a not too distant memory, we evaluated what worked and where we had holes in our Prepper Pantry. The emergency radio proved to be a crucial Prepper Pantry item, but it was lacking.

We retired our old emergency radio and bought one (two!) that we could power with batteries or a hand crank. The radio could tune in to multiple frequencies and recharge our mobile devices. (Hello, USB port!) We also love having a flashlight that’s part of the emergency radio that we can run with a bit of muscle power.

Power Station

However, you can only hand crank your little generator for so long to give your mobile devices a trickle of power. So what happens when you need more power for the long run or for larger devices?

We chose a Jackery power station with solar panels to provide us with electricity that we can use to run more extensive devices, such as our electric cooler.

Although we didn’t have an electric cooler during the ice storm, we decided to get one in case we lost power to keep critical items from our refrigerator from spoiling during hot weather. We are counting on our Jackery power station to provide the electricity our electric cooler needs to get over brownouts that might occur in Texas over this scorching summer in 2022. (I’ve lost count over the number of rainless days that have been well over 100°F.)

We have a few Jackery devices ranging from the Jackery 500 to help power our smaller appliances and a larger Jackery 1500 to power our electric cooler.

This is our plan. (If you recommend any changes, let me know in the comments below.)

1. Before a storm or calamity hits, we’ll make sure our Jackery devices are fully charged by plugging them into our wall outlets.
2. If we lose power, we will monitor our refrigerators using the Refrigerator Temperature Monitors I described earlier. If they breach a critical temperature, we will transfer the critical items from our refrigerator to our electric cooler and power our cooler with our Jackery devices.
3. If we need to recharge our Jackery, we’ll use the solar panels or crank up our automobile and use our car adapter to give us the juice to bring our Jackery back up to a higher power level.

Thus, the Jackery power station and electric cooler have become crucial Prepper Pantry devices.

For the complete list of 10 crucial Prepper Pantry items (and categories too!), be sure to watch my comprehensive video and get to adding these items to your own Prepper Pantry.

Create Your Own Prepper Pantry

If you happened to click the anchor link earlier in this blog post, you would have jumped to this section quickly rather than made it here after reading about some of the crucial Prepper Pantry items I discussed in my post.

So if you jumped down here, I bet you want to create a Prepper Pantry. Unfortunately, there is so much information on the Internet about prepping that it’s hard to know where to start.

I’m here to help you by showing you how to stock your Prepper Pantry with real food and on a budget. Watch the following videos to understand what you need and start creating your Prepper Pantry with confidence.

Accelerate Your Prepper Pantry

Budgeting for your Prepper Pantry is an excellent way to grow your Prepper Pantry over time, but what if you want to create your Prepper Pantry sooner rather than later? I’m here to help you with my accelerate your Prepper Pantry video and printable inventory list you can download for free.

Emergency Food Supply

And while you’re creating your Prepper Pantry, don’t forget to reserve room for a 2-week emergency food supply that you can quickly access in a crisis. This video comes with a Two Week Emergency Food Supply Shopping List and Meal Plan that you can download. (More free printables for you!)

More Prepper Pantry videos

If you already have a Prepper Pantry, be sure to watch my comprehensive playlist of videos where I show you everything from the best food storage options, how to seal mylar bags, and what type of whole grains you’ll want to store for the long term.

Download Your Free 36-Page Pantry List

For an extensive list of the traditional foods you can make and purchase to stock your pantry, be sure to download my free 36-page Traditional Foods Pantry List. This comprehensive eBook is full of links to recipe videos, helpful articles, and more!

Kitchen Academy Videos

Are you looking for more traditional foods videos? If so, I invite you to join the Traditional Foods Kitchen Academy. Members of this optional paid YouTube community get access to exclusive videos, live streams, and other members-only perks. Plus, your YouTube comments include a special members-only badge.

In the following members-only video, I talk about the Importance of Making Our Food Homemade.

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I look forward to having you join me in my Texas Hill Country Kitchen!

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Shop for items used in this blog post or video

Favorite Prepper Pantry Supplies

• Wireless Fridge and Freezer Exterior Thermometer
• Life Straw
• Water Disinfection Tablets
• Water BOB Tub Liner
• Cast Iron Trivet
• Tea Lights
• Glass Kettle
• Manual Can Opener
• Battery Powered Can Opener
• Long Lasting Ice Packs
• Igloo Cooler
• YETI Cooler
• Electric Cooler
• Jackery Solar Power Station
• Jackery Portable Solar Panels
• 10 Gauge Power Cord
• Kill A Watt EZ
• Hand Crank Flashlight
• High Powered Flashlight
• Hand Crank Emergency Radio

Favorite Kitchen Supplies

• Favorite Aprons
• Spice Grinder
• Countertop Burner (On my kitchen island in many recipe videos.)
• Handheld Vacuum Sealing System
• Vacuum Lids
• Whisk
• Silica Gel Packets (Helps keep moisture from building up in your mix)
• Cast Iron Dutch Oven
• 8-Quart Slow-Cooker
• Fat Separator (Clever kitchen device to help you decant bone broth)
• Flour Sack Towels
• pH Strips (Helps you check on the acidity of your vinegar)

More Kitchen Supplies with Discount Codes

• Mockmill Grain Mill (for making homemade flour)

Learn more about Mockmill electric grain mills for making fresh flour and their Flake Lover's Flaker that flakes whole grain in minutes.

• Masontops Fermentation Kit

Use promo code MARYSNST for a one-time 15% off Masontops and Breadsmart products on Amazon.com.

Amazon Shop and Shopping Guide

• Visit Mary’s Nest Amazon Shop
• Visit my Shopping Guide page
  Get up to 15% off for stocking your Traditional Foods Pantry and equipping your Modern Pioneer Kitchen, including discounts from US Wellness Meats, Farmhouse Teas, Lehman's, Masontops, Cultures for Health, Survival Garden Seeds, Redmond Real Salt, Plan to Eat, and More!

Recommended Reading

• Essential Pantry Cookbook